1561 Sir Francis Bacon - British statesman, lawyer, philosopher, writer (The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, The New Atlantis)
1775 André Ampère - French physicist who experimented with magnets, and after whom the electrical unit amp is named
1788 George Gordon, Lord Byron - Scottish-born romantic and satirical poet (Manfred, Cain, Don Juan, Hours of Idleness, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Childe Harold) Byron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and raised in near poverty. Afflicted with a clubfoot, Byron endured a painful childhood. At age 10, he inherited his great uncle's title. He attended Harrow, then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he ran up enormous debts and wrote poetry. His first published volume of poetry was savaged by critics, especially in Scotland, and his second published work attacked the English literary establishment. In 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, and the couple had a daughter, Ada, the following year. Ada proved to be a mathematical prodigy and is considered by some to be the first computer programmer, thanks to her work on Charles Babbage's computing machine. Byron and his wife separated as scandal broke out over Byron's suspected incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was ostracised by polite society and forced to flee England in 1816. He settled in Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and became intimately involved with Mary's half-sister, Claire Clairmont. She bore Byron's daughter Allegra in January 1817. Byron moved to Venice that year and entered a period of wild debauchery. In 1819, he began an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an elderly count, and the two remained attached for many years. Byron, always an avid supporter of liberal causes and national independence, supported the Greek war for independence. He joined the cause in Greece, training troops in the town of Missolonghi, where he died of malaria just after his 36th birthday
1875 D.W. Griffith - Film producer, director (The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance)
1909 Ann Sothern – Actress (Private Secretary, Lady Be Good, Panama Hattie, The Whales of August, The Ann Sothern Show, Masie) She was also the voice of the 1928 Porter in My Mother the Car. She was the mother of actress Tisha Sterling
1924 J.J. Johnson - Musician, trombonist, composer, bandleader. He was one of first to use the trombone in modern jazz
1931 Sam Cooke - Singer (You Send Me, Chain Gang, Wonderful World, A Change is Gonna Come)
1932 Piper Laurie - Actress (Days of Wine and Roses, Carrie, The Hustler, The Thorn Birds, Twin Peaks)
1934 Bill Bixby - Actor (My Favourite Martian, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, The Incredible Hulk, Rich Man Poor Man, Goodnight Beantown, The Magician)
1934 Graham Kerr – British born TV chef (The Galloping Gourmet)
1936 Nyree Dawn Porter - New Zealand born actress (The Forsythe Saga, The Protectors, The Martian Chronicles)
1939 Sonny Chiba – Japanese actor and martial arts expert (The Streetfighter, Kill Bill Vol. 1, The Storm Riders, The Fast and the Furious: Toyko Drift, Aces: Iron Eagle III)
1939 Jeff Smith - TV chef and cookbook author (The Frugal Gourmet)
1940 John Hurt - British actor (I Claudius, Elephant Man, Alien, The Wild and the Willing, A Man For All Seasons, Spaceballs) He played Tony Grey in The Sweeney episode Tomorrow Man
1965 Diane Lane – Actress (Lonesome Dove, Chaplin, The Cotton Club, The Perfect Storm, Murder at 1600, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, A Little Romance)
1967 Olivia d'Abo – British actress (The Wonder Years, It Had to Be You, Wayne's World 2, Point of No Return, Conan the Destroyer)
1971 Katie Finneran – Actress (Wonderfalls, The Inside, Baby on Board, I Hate My Teenage Daughter)
Died this Day
1719 William Patterson - Scottish financier and founder of the Bank of England
1887 Sir Joseph Whitworth - British mechanical engineer who standardised screw threads
1900 David Edward Hughes - British inventor of the carbon microphone. He settled in the US, but left his fortune to London hospitals
1901 Queen Victoria, age 81 - Long-reigning British Monarch whose death ended an era in which most of her subjects knew no other monarch. Spanning 64 years, her reign, the longest in British history at the time, saw the growth of an empire on which the sun never set. As a young woman ascending to the throne, she was described as one whose extreme obstinacy was constantly at war with her good nature. She proposed to her German cousin, Prince Albert and they were wed in February 1840. He soon became the dominant influence in her life and served as her private secretary. When Albert died in 1861, Victoria did not appear in public for three years, and entered a forty-year period of mourning. During the last few decades of her life, her popularity, which had suffered during her long public absence, increased greatly. She never embraced the social and technological advances of the 19th century but accepted the changes and worked hard to fulfil her ceremonial duties as head of state. When she died, she had 37 surviving great-grandchildren, and their marriages with other monarchies gave her the name the "grandmother of Europe"
1922 Pope Benedict XV - He was succeeded by Pius XI
1973 Lyndon B. Johnson - US President, who assumed power after the assassination of JFK
1994 Telly Savalas - Actor, died in Universal City, California, a day after his 70th birthday
1995 Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, age 104 - Matriarch of the Kennedy family. She died at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts
On this Day
1840 The first British colonists reached New Zealand under the leadership of British statesman Edward G. Wakefield, arriving at Port Nicholson on Auckland Island. Although Europeans had been aware of the islands comprising New Zealand since 1642, they did not attract much attention until the late 18th century, when English explorer Captain James Cook travelled through the area and wrote detailed accounts of them. Whalers, missionaries, and traders followed, and in 1840 Britain formally annexed the islands and established New Zealand's first permanent European settlement at Wellington. That year, the Maori signed the Treaty of Waitangi, by which they recognised British sovereignty in exchange for guaranteed possession of their land. However, armed territorial conflict between the Maori and white settlers continued until 1870, when there were few Maori left to resist the European encroachment
1878 Canada was given the right to decide whether it wanted to be included in British treaties
1905 The First Russian Revolution began when tsarist troops opened fire on a peaceful group of workers marching to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to petition their grievances to Tsar Nicholas II. Some 500 protestors were massacred on "Bloody Sunday," setting off months of protest and disorder throughout Russia. Discontent with the tsar's regime permeated nearly all classes in Russia, especially after the crushing defeat, early in January, of the Russian navy at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War. In October 1905, Nicholas, embattled on all sides, was forced to grant basic civil liberties and a representative national body, which would be elected by narrowly limited suffrage. However, this Parliament, known as the Duma, was dissolved after it opposed Nicholas' authority, and the remnants of the revolutionary movement were brutally suppressed by tsarist troops. A decade later, tsarist Russia was bogged down in the mire of World War I, prompting the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917, which crushed the tsar's opposition and proclaimed Russia the world's first Marxist state
1912 The first bridge to the Florida Keys opened. It carried the Florida East Coast Railroad, running between Key West and the mainland. The railroad closed in 1935 and three years later the roadway was paved, bringing automotive traffic to the Florida Keys for the first time
1922 At Toronto General Hospital, in Ontario, 14-year-old diabetes patient Leonard Thompson became the first person to have his diabetes successfully treated, with Banting and Best's new discovery, insulin. Diabetes had been recognised as a distinct medical condition for more than 3,000 years, but its exact cause was a mystery until the 20th century. By the early 1920s, many researchers strongly suspected that diabetes was caused by a malfunction in the digestive system related to the pancreas gland, a small organ that sits on top of the liver. At that time, the only way to treat the fatal disease was through a diet low in carbohydrates and sugar and high in fat and protein. Instead of dying shortly after diagnosis, this diet allowed diabetics to live for about a year. A breakthrough came at the University of Toronto in the summer of 1921, when Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolated insulin from canine test subjects, produced diabetic symptoms in the animals, and then began a program of insulin injections that returned the dogs to normalcy. In November that year, the discovery was announced to the world. Two months later, with the support of J.J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto, the two scientists began preparations for an insulin treatment of a human subject. Enlisting the aid of biochemist J.B. Collip, they were able to extract a reasonably pure formula of insulin from the pancreas of cattle from slaughterhouses and used it to treat Leonard Thompson. The diabetic teenager improved dramatically, and the University of Toronto immediately gave pharmaceutical companies license to produce insulin, free of royalties. By 1923, insulin had become widely available, saving countless lives around the world, and Banting and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine
1938 Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, was performed publicly for the first time, in Princeton, New Jersey
1953 The Arthur Miller drama, The Crucible, opened on Broadway
1992 Dr Roberta Bondar became Canada's first woman in space when she and six other astronauts blasted off aboard the shuttle Discovery
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